


Night Gathers

by Siamesa



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous Character Death, Angst, Gen, Reunions, The Night's Watch, The Others - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-19
Updated: 2016-08-19
Packaged: 2018-08-09 20:19:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7815691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siamesa/pseuds/Siamesa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five people who never joined the Night's Watch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Night Gathers

**Author's Note:**

> In roughly chronological order.   
> Each section is a stand-alone AU - I thought about trying to weld them together but it got rapidly too confusing.

_i._ _Father no children._

His duty was to the boy.

He’d tried to run, to drown himself in blood and drink in Essos like every man before him who’d served a fallen king.  But he’d heard the news before the year was out.  Robert Baratheon thought himself merciful.

Rhaegar’s son was at the Wall.

A child, a babe in arms, the rightful King of Westeros, sentenced to a walking death.  And so Jon Connington sailed to Eastwatch, and vowed to walk it beside him.

Aegon survived the wind, the cold, the cough that seemed like to tear the lungs from his body.  He grew, too lanky for his limbs, his eyes darker and harder than Rhaegar’s had been.  Connington was made a Ranger, a busy man, and he had been warned not to make a son out of his brother.  He could hear it, just beneath the words, _don’t make a king._

“Higher,” Connington says.  “Shift your stance.  I’m a Wildling, coming at you with a club.”

Aegon’s eyes flicker up, and he sets his feet in the snow.  “For the Watch!”

Connington bears down, and Aegon meets the blow easily.  Another, and with a snap the heavy stick breaks in Connington’s hands, and Aegon’s wooden sword is at his throat.

“Well done.”  Connington takes the offered hand, and the boy pulls him to his feet.

“That’s three,” Aegon says.  He leans back against a post.  “Tell me about my father again?  About sparring with him?  About…”  The boy trails off, his eyes on the ground.  He has never asked about Rhaegar’s death, but Connington can see him, every time, coming closer to the question.  He has never asked, _are there lords out there, who wish for a different king?_

Secrets hang around them.  Connington thumps Aegon’s shoulder, like an uncle, like a father.  He spins out a tale of days gone by as they trudge through the snow.

Sometimes, at night, he hears Rhaegar, a song on the wind whose words he can never decipher.  He’s seen him, in the stars and the snow, on the nights beyond the Wall where there’s nothing around but the fear and the ice and the memories.

_Are you proud of him,_ he would ask, if he thought that a spirit would answer.  _Are you proud of me?_

 

_ii._ _Hold no lands._

Jaime Lannister slogs through the snow.  Fifteen years, and the cold still bites as true as it ever has.  He knows it will get worse.  _Winter is coming,_ they say, over and over, and Jaime thinks of sanctimonious Lord Stark and wants to go stab something.

He looks back at his men.  Lans is leading the pack horses.  At least the frost hasn’t gotten _them._ Royce is saying something to Gared; he ought to nip that in the bud.  No doubt the Old Bear had meant Ser Waymar to learn something, following Jaime.  _Once, I too was a smug shit with a sword, and worse, because I killed a king!  Now look at me, a credit to this whole horrible group of self-righteous Northerners and petty thieves._ His fists clench, one going to Longclaw’s hilt.

It’s not his sword.  It’s another of the things Mormont dangles in front of him, things he could earn if he would only fall in line.  He’s a respected Ranger and the best swordsman to ever wear the black, but Mormont wants – well.  Mormont wants Jaime Mormont, more or less, Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, and Jaime has had enough of one father’s expectations.  He isn’t inclined to add a second.

“Bodies!” 

Will is already poking around them.  Wildlings, from the looks of things, lying in heaps on the snow.

There’s something wrong here.  He can nearly taste it in the air.  He stares at the body nearest, frozen with its eyes open, blue and staring, mesmerizing.

Lans screams, and the body reaches out towards Jaime’s throat.

A stab, and a slash, and a fallen head, but they keep coming, out of the trees and out of the darkness.  Someone screams for fire.  Suddenly there’s Gared, with a burning branch, and then there’s Gared, dead on the ground.  One of the trees catches fire.

_So this is how I die._ It might even be glorious, were they an army of heroes rather than a group of men tripping over their own boots in terror.  He thrusts out with Mormont’s sword, shoving one of the corpses into the burning tree.  Smoke bites at his eyes, and then he sees it.

Something, moving through the woods, silent and cold and freezing the breath in his lungs.

“Run!” he screams.  “I’ll hold it off!”

The forest burns around him.  The white thing glides toward him.

Jaime tightens his grip on Longclaw, and smiles.

_iii.  Wear no crown._

Tommen stays with Maester Aemon.  It’s safe there.  There are books, and walls, and a quiet old man who doesn’t ask him questions when he doesn’t want to answer.

Once a man stomped in, yelling. (Tommen doesn’t know any of their names, doesn’t want to know any of their names.  Tommen wants to wake up in his soft bed and see the warm red walls, tell Myrcella of his nightmare, see his mother, whole and alive). 

_He’s old enough to hold a sword, he’s old enough to fight.  Stop coddling the little bastard._

Little bastard.  Little bastard.  He is Prince Tommen Baratheon, trueborn son of King Robert and Queen Cersei.  He doesn’t scream it, like Joff does.  He just thinks it, over and over in his head.

Maester Aemon had said that Tommen was his assistant, that men of the Night’s Watch could even learn at the Citadel and return to serve their brothers.

There had been more shouting, hissing of Targaryens and incest and Mother, and Tommen had run away before he began to cry.  Up here, the tears freeze to his skin, and you can’t show weakness, because all of the men are like Joff.

Now he sits behind an empty storage crate, knees drawn up to his chest, blinking to keep his eyelids from freezing shut.

“Tommen?”  A hand hovers over his shoulder, and he turns to see Sam.  “Maester Aemon couldn’t find you.”

Together they walk, slowly, back out towards Aemon’s tower.  They pass men training in the yard below, but Tommen can’t see his brother.  _Maybe he’s dead._ There had been times, on very bad nights back home, when he’d been evil and wished Joffrey dead.  Now, his brother is his only link to who they were, the only one who knows that they’re princes, that their father was deceived, that someday they’ll go home.

Lord Stark stands at the top of the stairs.  Tommen jerks back, only to see Sam’s face light up.  “Jon!”

Jon Snow.  The bastard, the true bastard.  Just Jon Snow.  He’s seen him half a hundred times.  Tommen tries to breathe again.

Sam turns to Snow, and Tommen turns to the door of the tower.  “Maester?”

Aemon stands up at once, his hands going unerringly to Tommen’s shoulders.  “Tommen.”  He sighs, deeply.  “You should not have had to hear those words.”  He steps away then, towards the shelves.  “Now, could you assist me in finding _The Records of the Citadel –_ Volume Twelve, I believe--”

Tommen pulls the heavy book from the shelf.

“We’ll send you there,” Maester Aemon says solemnly, “when this all boils over.”

_All boils over._ The Maester is a Targaryen.  He’s lost everything. 

“Did you grow up in the Red Keep?” asks Tommen.  _Does it still hurt, to know you’ll never go home again?_

_iv. Win no glory._

 Theon watches the last of the ravens go.  They’ve had no answers.  At this point, all they’re doing is sending away perfectly good food.

(He’d planned for a siege of Winterfell, when he’d first seen the army gathered, Mountain banners all.  He’d even begun to inventory the food, to prioritize the prisoners and survivors.  He hadn’t planned for someone to open the gates.)

The Wildlings are coming.  Robb is either trapped beneath the Neck, or dead; Theon can’t imagine him abandoning the Watch under any other circumstances.  Surely he wouldn’t let the Wall fall to the Wildlings just to spite Theon Turncloak.

He could talk to Jon about Robb, but Jon hates him.  He’d told him about Bran and Rickon, about the miller’s boys, and he’d kept his voice steady, or as steady as it could be, with a direwolf pinning him to the ground.  Jon had called him a murderer, all the same, but he’d been crying when he said it.

The Mountain Clans all know, too, and so Robb must – more than likely one of the boys is already Prince of Winterfell again.  Presumably Rickon, who can’t write, thus explaining why Winterfell, too, has abandoned the Watch.

They’ll face this alone.  Theon will face this alone. Jon, good honorable Jon, will face it with his black brothers, but even the most useless Flea Bottom pickpocket on the Wall would shy away from being a brother to Theon.

_I had it all,_ he thinks, as he looses an arrow.  _I had it all planned out._

Another arrow.  He cannot see if either hit.  _And now I have nothing._

_No.  Not nothing._ This arrow does hit, cleanly, in a mammoth’s eye.  His father would have disowned him even if Theon hadn’t sworn away all family ties.  Robb – he can’t think about Robb, not living, not dead.  But he has _this._

_A bow.  A quiver.  A shortsword._

And, as riders charge, banners flying, shouting a king’s name louder, and louder, and louder –

_A future._

 

_v._ _My life and honor._

“This ship’s for supplies, and recruits, boy.  You’re neither.”

Arry scowls up at him, fists clenched.  “I want to join the Night’s Watch.”

“You?”

“Lay off him, Garren.  We’re hard up enough as it is.  You want to join the Night’s Watch, boy?”

Garren blusters. “ _Why?”_

Arry considers this.  _To find my brother_ is rejected immediately.  They might know Jon, or they might know _of_ him, and draw unfortunate conclusions.  They might be Lannister men, or Bolton men – they’re sailors afterall, not Brothers.  “There’s food there,” she offers instead.

The second man slaps Garren on the back.  “You see?  Smart kid we’ve got here.  What’s your name, then?”

“Arry.  I can do ship work,” she adds.  She can try, at least. “And I’ve got coin.”

They take more of her coin than she thinks they ought, but she keeps silent.  She’s on a ship to Eastwatch.  She’s on a ship to Jon.

She cannot do proper shipwork, not with ropes and sails.  But she can clean a deck as easily as she did a floor at Harrenhal.  She can fetch and carry.  She can slip out of her hammock, in the night, Needle at her side, and feel the cold winds of the North on her face.

One sailor thinks he can sing.  _Bear and the Maiden Fair, Dornishman’s Wife, Brave Danny Flint._

Arry isn’t a fool.  She knows she won’t be able to pass as a boy forever.  But Danny Flint didn’t have Needle.  Danny Flint didn’t have Jon.  And Arya Stark has no one else.  No one else, but her favorite brother, her last brother. Her brother who thinks that she is dead. 

Jon is not at Eastwatch, but neither are they, for very long.  Nightfall on the Wall is beautiful, but the men around her begin to shake as they press on through the dark.

“There have been changes.” That’s all the information they get, as the recruits are passed along from group of men to group of men.  “A new Lord Commander,” someone says.  “The King’s here,” says another, and Arry’s blood runs cold.  Then: “Which king?”  It’s a joke, or meant as one, from the speaker’s harsh laugh. “King Stannis, King Stannis.”  “Lord Stannis,” another man says, and he spits.  Arry can see the punch even before it’s thrown.  She kicks her shaggy pony ahead.  She can see Castle Black.

“Hey!” 

“Watch it, you little shit!”

She ignores them.  She ignores all of them, and she ignores the little voice in the back of her head : _what if he’s not here?  What if he’s dead, too?_

She slides off her pony, and nearly off her feet as well.  “Jon Snow!” she says, to the nearest man in black, grabbing his sleeve.  “Where can I find Jon Snow?”

The man looks up, and yells at someone across the way.  “We’ve got a recruit wants to see the Lord Commander.”  He turns back to Arry, kneeling down.  “Now look, boy.  This isn’t how we do things around here.  You take the Black, you follow orders.  You learn your place, and then you get to earning yourself a better one.  I know you’re young, but –”

“Jon!”

She ducks away, then starts running.  “Jon!”

She doesn’t know the second, when he sees her, when he knows her.  But his arms are out to catch her before she can lock hers around his waist, to pull her into the air.

“Arya,” he says.  “ _Arya, how?”_   But he’s laughing, he’s laughing and he’s crying and _he’s alive._

She’s crying, too, her head buried in his furs.

When he sets her to her feet, though, his eyes are serious.

“Arya,” he says.  “King Stannis plans to retake Winterfell.”  He swallows.  “With Sansa missing… he will want to do it in your name.”

She grabs at his hand, so tightly it must be hurting him.  _Another war.  Another king._

_Winterfell._

“I would like to meet him,” she says, finally, but it’s Mother’s voice that speaks the words.

Jon pokes her in the stomach.  “I think you might prefer to eat first.”

Arya pokes him back, then once more for good measure.  “Lead the way, _Lord Commander.”_

She follows his laughter up the stairs.


End file.
